200 Newtown massacres, every day.

The horror felt is real, because the carnage of massacre was horrifying.

Twenty young children, slain for no good reason. Adam Lanza just decided they were inconvenient to him. It was horribly wrong to do this. What Lanza did was wrong not because the parents of those children loved them and wanted them to remain alive. What Lanza did was wrong because each those children was an individual, unique, beautiful human person with his or her own soul and right to continue living.

It is a right that precedes all other rights, and no other rights are possible without it. It is a right that no one can take away, it can only be surrendered through one’s own actions. Adam Lanza ignored the unalienable right those children had to live and killed twenty of them.

Every single day in our country the body count of the Newtown massacre is met two-hundred times over in abortionists’ facilities. Two-hundred Newtowns, daily. The mind reels, the heart breaks.

In response to the Newtown massacre a hue and cry has arisen to restrict gun rights. The awful irony is that the Venn diagram of those who most ardently support such restrictions on guns and those who most ardently support a woman’s right to choose an abortion very likely have significant overlap.

Those same people would be hard-pressed to identify the moment at which the child in utero acquires the right to life, usually preferring to avoid the question entirely. They’d rather discuss the woman’s right to choose what to do with her body and ignore the hard reality that the presence of a new person in her womb changes the dynamic of the question utterly—of course it is her body, but it is also that child’s home.

President Obama and all who have been speaking after him on the topic of gun violence have repeated variations of, “If we can save even one child, it is worth it; we have a responsibility to act; we will be judged on how we move to protect the most vulnerable amongst us.”

Who can disagree with that? And yet, so many who call for measures that would save, at most, a few dozen children’s lives per year in this country defend a practice that directly takes 4,000 children’s lives per year.

Let’s move to value and protect them all.

The views expressed here are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views of CatholicVote.org

About Author

Tom Crowe is a cradle Catholic with a deep love for and commitment to Holy Mother the Church, colored by a rather interesting life-long relationship with her. Born during the great liturgical upheaval of the 1970s, Crowe was brought up in a parish that continued using the Missal of 1962—the Traditional Latin Mass—for which he developed a love. Crowe learned the faith as a child from the Baltimore Catechism, and didn’t stop learning and wrestling with the Church’s teachings at his Confirmation. Through reading and many conversations with friends and converts far smarter than he, Crowe came to know, accept, and love the Church and what she proposes far more intimately. For three years these conversation took place in seminary before Crowe, with the blessing of the formation team, determined that seminary was not right for him. In the wild and humorous ways of God, Crowe landed on his feet in Steubenville, Ohio, where he manages the online presence for Franciscan University of Steubenville, where he also trains altar servers and is the head master of ceremonies for the Mass in the Extraordinary Form on campus.